1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of controlling execution of jobs for executing a plurality of jobs or job steps each being a unit for computer execution collectively and a system therefor.
2. Description of the Related Art
In order to obtain a desired result by utilizing a computer system, it is required in general to collectively execute a plurality of execution units, each being called a job or a job step (hereafter, described as a job collectively). For such a purpose, it is necessary for a user to inform execution sequence and execution condition of a series of jobs to the computer system. In order to provide a simple interface therefor, the execution sequence and the execution condition of a series of jobs are defined in advance of execution of jobs and a job execution management system controls the execution sequence of the jobs in accordance with the definition, as described in, for example, Hitachi Software Engineering Co., Ltd. APP VOS 3, VOS 3/SP, VOS 3/ES1 Integrated Operation Management System HOPSS 3 (Hitachi Operation Support System) General Statement APP-A-268-70, pp. 15-42. When a job under execution of the series of jobs is abnormally terminated, rerun is performed, in response to a command from a user, from a job corresponding to a job name indicated in the command.
In above-mentioned related art, when a certain job is abnormally terminated during execution of a series of jobs, it has been required that the user investigates the cause of abnormal termination of the job to determine from which job rerun is to be started, and input a rerun command which designates a name of the job to be started to rerun the series of jobs. Thus, it was necessary for an operator to stand-by for the abnormal termination.
Further, in determining the rerun starting job, when termination is made abnormally because of detection of trouble in a reading operation of data from a file, for instance, it is required to rerun from a job in which the file was written. Among the jobs on the way, however, there are jobs which only back up a certain file or which only output processing results to a printer. Such jobs are not required to rerun. In such a case, the rerun time has been made longer for that portion.
Furthermore, it is possible that a file which is stored in the same storage device as the file in which the trouble was detected has been destructed in a similar manner. Therefore, it is also required to determine the rerun job so that these files are specified and recreated. In that case, there is a method of allocating respective files to storage devices such that the storage device which stores that file is not specified in advance, but a storage destination is determined in a storage device having a vacant area among several storage devices at the time of job execution. When such a method is used, the scope of destructed files is expanded because the data of variety of files are stored in the same device, thus the scope of the jobs to be rerun are expanded, too.